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And for about ten minutes, twice a week, she had Jeremiah.
Every morning after deciding she wasn’t ready to leave, she tested what remained of her feelings for Jeremiah. Like lifting the lid off a rain bucket, she checked the levels, and to her pain and chagrin, the levels stayed the same.
The infatuation wasn’t ending. These feelings were not fleeting. Four times a week, her heart stopped at the sight of his beat-up truck in the driveway.
And every day, at least twenty times—when her mind was the most still, when she was in the garden, or tearing apart her jewelry only to rebuild it with leather and silver from the scraps of tack she’d salvaged from the barn—she hoped he was okay.
If she couldn’t be with him, she wanted the sacrifice to be worth something.
Thursday morning she awoke sick of herself.
The longer she lay there, the more it felt as if her chest was collapsing under the pressure of her yearning. Her longing to see him. Talk to him. Maybe today he’d stop long enough to talk, she thought, and then hated herself.
Honestly, this is not you. Do not let that man turn you into this.
Get out of bed.
That seemed a bit extreme, so she compromised by pawing around her bedside table for her cell phone.
Within ten minutes she’d called her real estate agent and told her to put the condo on the market in earnest. And sell it, sooner rather than later.
“What about your stuff? I put what was here in storage—”
“I’ll come and get it in a few days.”
Hanging up the phone on Los Angeles and her ties there felt liberating. As if she’d finally managed to get rid of the stone necklace she’d been pretending wasn’t killing her back. She could go back and pick up their stuff, and then she’d put that city in her rearview mirror for good.
Amber she thought suddenly. And garnets. Oh my gosh, in a bridal tiara.
Sitting up, she grabbed the notebook she’d been keeping by her bed and found a blank page. She found one of the ten charcoal pencils strewn across the foot of her bed and frantically started to sketch. Gold, with delicate points of amber and garnet, as if golden-red rain had been caught in the bride’s hair.
Wow, she thought, when she was done. Expensive. One of a kind. Meredith Van Loan came to mind again.
It would be easy to call her. Just press the button.
You need pieces to show her, Lucy thought. You can’t just call her and say Hey, I’ve got some sketches on napkins that I think you’d like.
Nope. It wasn’t time. She closed the phone and pulled on some clothes. She had a couple hundred dollars from the ill-fated taxi business. Perhaps it was time to see what she could scrounge together in terms of materials and tools.
Perhaps it was time to scrounge together a second chance.
Jeremiah wasn’t sleeping well. He wasn’t eating well, either. He wasn’t actually doing anything well.
Lucy was a thorn under his skin. He’d narrowed their contact down to ten minutes a week, and somehow those ten minutes had become painfully paramount in his life.
Bullshit, he thought, wishing that denying it made it less true. But with his stomach in knots he drove over Friday afternoon to pick up Ben.
Ignore, her, he told himself. Just ignore her.
She made herself impossible to ignore, sitting there when he drove up. She wore tight jeans and a silky shirt that had no business being so close to a barn.
And what was she doing even sitting there with Ben and Walter? What could she possibly be achieving if she wasn’t just trying to torture him?
He slammed the door behind him, probably too hard if the startled looks on the faces of Lucy, Ben and Walter were anything to go by. As he stomped up, his evil mood grew blacker. She must have picked up on his internal viciousness because she stood and headed into the barn.
Walter stood too, looking like a man who had no need of a nine-year-old nurse.
“Ben,” Walter said. “Help me to get inside, would you?”
“Ah, sure,” Ben said. He stretched the reins he’d been working on out in the grass to dry and stood up, taking Walter’s elbow. “I’ll…I’ll be right back,” he said to Jeremiah.
“Fine,” Jeremiah snapped and then belatedly got hold of himself enough to apologize. “Sorry, Ben, yes, go on. I’ll wait here.”
It was foolish, crazy even, but it suddenly felt as if the entire universe was conspiring to throw him into Lucy’s orbit. And he was no good at resisting. Terrible at it.
Ben and Walter crossed the rutted parking area and Jeremiah resisted his baser instincts for exactly ten seconds before spinning on his heel and stomping into the barn.
He found her in the cool shadows of the tack room, her back to him as she stood at the sink, rinsing out rags.
